


City of Eagles

by freifraufischer



Series: ShadowGate [2]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-19
Updated: 2015-01-19
Packaged: 2018-03-08 07:35:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 10,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3200843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freifraufischer/pseuds/freifraufischer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An AU. At the height of the Berlin Airlift, at the dawn of the Cold War, academic and sometime CIA agent Elizabeth Weir has disappeared in the city at the heart of the conflict. Now John Sheppard, an air force reservist called up to help feed the embattled city, must find her before she becomes a casualty of the Cold War. The second of two stories in the ShadowGate Universe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

March, 1949  
 _Munich, Germany_

Lieutenant Colonel Cameron Mitchell tried to make his way through the crowded and cavernous beer hall, a cacophony of music, language, eating, and especially drinking all around him. There were hundreds of American soldiers to be found in the streets of Munich. Half of them seemed to be out with German fräuleins and drawing the jealous attentions of the civilian men in the crowd who five years before might have been shooting at the same soldiers their sisters or daughters were now dancing with.

Still, the war had been over for four years and most people in the Western Zones of occupation seemed to want to move on, and Cameron was happy to let them. He had spent his wartime duty fighting the Japanese and didn't hold any grudges here. He was also blessed by the blue of his uniform, which in Berlin and the rest of the Western Zones told the population that he was one of those risking their lives every day to fly food, coal, and the basic provisions of life into the blockaded city of Berlin.

Among the crowd he soon spotted who he was looking for and he came up and settled in across from him. "Sheppard, only you would come to a beer hall in the greatest beer drinking city on earth and be there for the food."

Major John Sheppard, United States Air Force Reserve, did not look up from his bratwurst with sauerkraut and potatoes except to give him a grin. "Twenty-four hours from bottle to throttle, you know that, Cam."

"Don't you have two weeks' leave coming up? You aren't flying tomorrow."

"I'm hitching a ride into Berlin to see my girlfriend, might as well help drive the truck."

"This the woman you had here a few months back? Brown hair, green eyes, legs that go on forever…."

"That would be Elizabeth."

"You really are a glutton for punishment, Sheppard. How many times have you asked her to marry you and she said no?"

"She said no twice, and didn't answer me the other two."

"Didn't your mother ever tell you that stunned deer-in-headlights look was a no, John?"

Sheppard forced a smile, and pushed a few potatoes around the plate. "No, but she did tell me that if at first I don't succeed, try, try again."

Mitchell just shook his head. "What's she doing in Berlin anyway? I thought she was going to school in England."

"Cambridge, a doctoral candidate. She's doing research in Berlin and teaching at the Free University of Berlin. Principles of international relations. I tried to sit in on a class once but besides not being able to speak German I don't think I would have been able to follow her if she'd been speaking English."

"And she hasn't married you why? Aside from your scruffy and wild ways."

"Who's scruffy?"

"When was the last time you shaved?"

"This morning."

"Really, I thought it might have been 1945 by the look of it."

John just gave him a smile. "She says she doesn't want to settle down and be a professor's wife and attend math department functions. In fact I don't really think she's ready to go back to the States. I think her mother is setting those big iron bear traps all over the family estate to catch her at an unsuspecting moment by the way Elizabeth describes it." To emphasize the point he made a clam motion with his hand to imitate the cartoon traps from Warner Brothers shorts.

"How long have you been chasing this one?"

"Four… or seven years… depending on when you start counting."

"Do you ever give up?"

"Not a chance."

The next morning as John angled the Douglas C-54 Skymaster onto approach at Tempelhof he could see the hoards of young German kids lining the fence line. Handing control off to the other pilot he reached into a satchel, and as they passed over the children by thirty feet he tossed out a few handfuls of candy as had become his custom. Elizabeth had told him once that the children called all the pilots who did this Candy Bombers and he'd rather liked the idea.

The conversation the night before with Mitchell had him thinking more and more about Elizabeth and their on-again off-again on-again off-again relationship. She'd become almost coy about the entire marriage thing, and in truth John was pretty sure he understood why. He had trouble picturing her settling into life as the wife of a junior faculty member at the University of Chicago. He'd gotten the job after the war, and they had promised him it was waiting for him when he had been called up to reserve duty for the airlift into Berlin.

Elizabeth Weir wasn't ready to give up her own education for him, and she wasn't ready yet to give up being a spy. They'd joked a few times that she was married to the CIA, and that was why she couldn't marry him. He suspected that her family would disapprove of that even more than they disapproved of him. Elizabeth's sister was nice, but her mother seemed to live for disapproving of her oldest daughter.

And Elizabeth seemed to live to do things her mother would disapprove of.

As soon as the aircraft settled onto the ground the German laborers started to unload the bags of potatoes, flour, and sugar in the back. John said goodbye to the pilot and with his hat at a jaunty angle and shouldering his bag he started towards the airport gates, pausing when he got there and didn't see Elizabeth, but instead her boss, a genial Saxon running the department she was in at the university.

"Major Sheppard, did Elise come to visit you?"

John knit his eyebrows together. "Nooo, Herr Professor… why?"

The German looked disturbed. "Because she didn't show up for class three days ago."


	2. Chapter 2

_Four days earlier…_

_Berlin_

Elizabeth Weir stepped off of the streetcar a few blocks from her apartment in the western part of Berlin not long after midnight and walked brusquely towards home. She had been at the university late helping the administrators make arrangements for more buildings with the city government and dealing with the other day-to-day business of getting a new university off the ground. Most of those associated with the Freie Universität Berlin, both staff and students, and had been expelled from the older Humboldt-Universität in the Eastern Zone of Berlin the year before, and moved to the safety of the western controlled part of the city. Elizabeth had even asked her father to pull a few strings with General Lucius Clay to help the fledging school. She was almost certain her father was as shocked as anyone else that she would reach out to him. It was a good cause though, and it was gratifying work of which Elizabeth was immensely proud, and it also gave her a certain cover for being in the city at all.

It wasn't as if Berlin was an easy city to live in during these perilous times. There were still giant piles of rubble around, though restricted into neat piles four years after the war, which contrasted with Madrid, which, the last time she visited, still looked like the Civil War had ended the day before, not a decade ago. Even with the constant noise of aircraft flying in with everything the city needed for survival, Elizabeth thought she could smell the optimism and pride in what was being accomplished. And defiance. Berliners were scrappy, and in a way she thought she was adopting them because they reminded her so much of New Yorkers. It was the first time she had really felt at home, not in Madrid, or Paris, or Cambridge, but in the bustle and activity of cynical and sophisticated Berlin.

She didn't feel that way when she visited the eastern parts of the city. It was easy; the city's division was an unnatural one of politics, not topography, and all it took was a streetcar and a little nerve and you could just walk into East Berlin. There it felt like a cloud hung over the people, with the leer of eyes watching everyone and every thing. A few times she had been nearly accosted by a Soviet soldier, and Elizabeth had later wondered, if she had spoken in German and tried to pass… exactly how far those encounters would have gone.

She preferred to stay west, and both her job with the university and the CIA generally allowed that of her. In fact General Hammond would prefer if she stayed out of East Berlin entirely, she thought. Berlin was a dangerous city for his agents and her work in Madrid had made her well known to Moscow, and what she was currently doing with the Free University was baiting the Russian bear. By definition it was made up of those that the communists had deemed politically unreliable and there was some concern that given the open nature of the city those involved in the project might find themselves dead one day. Or worse. Disappearing was not an unheard-of event in this, the kidnapping capital of the world.

It was March in Berlin and winter had not yet left them. Everything had a light dusting of snow that had fallen in the last few hours and in the cold weather Elizabeth pushed her hands deeper into the pockets of her coat as she walked. Something in the back of her mind began to nag at her, though, and she turned around twice but did not see anyone on the street. All the same, she began to walk faster; the click of her heels on the sidewalk dampened by the snow.

When the hand came up behind her and clamped over her mouth she began to struggle and kick and attempted to scream. The noise was muffled in the winter snow and soon she found herself shoved in the back of a car that had come out of nowhere, the body of a heavy man on top of her, and the car began speeding off into the night.

Into the east.

They had driven for what had seemed like hours deep into the countryside when the car finally pulled into an imposing fortress-like prison in the Soviet Zone. Elizabeth had tried to speak to the guards, to demand an explanation, to find out where she was, but all it had gotten her was a slap to the face. It was a surreal place and when she looked up at the walls she could see cold alien figures standing next to bright spotlights aiming down the courtyard. This was the kind of place she had had nightmares about many times, and a small part of her hoped very much that she would wake up from this one in her bed back in Berlin. The men searched her roughly, taking away both her passport and coat and she was unceremoniously tossed into a damp cell painted a sickly yellow color with chipped and peeling paint that probably dated back to the Kaiser.

For the first time in a very long time, Elizabeth Weir prayed.

It wasn't until the morning that a guard came again to her, yanking her to her feet, handcuffing her and shoving her out the door. There was more chipped paint everywhere, and it seemed as she was brought around each corner there was yet another young Soviet soldier leering at her like she was cattle… or something worse. She was brought to a small room and seated at a table, with a glass of water, and a figure standing in the shadows.

"Dr. Elizabeth Weir." When the figure spoke, Elizabeth could tell it was a woman, and if the accent was any indication, upper class English.

"I'm not a doctor yet. I haven't defended my dissertation."

She laughed and stepped into the light. "Always were one for defining things precisely and properly, weren't you, Elizabeth."

"Dr. Sarah Gardner." She recognized the woman; they had known each other at Cambridge, but only in passing, as she was an archaeology post doc. "Funny place to meet you."

Sarah smiled, and the pit of Elizabeth's stomach dropped, with the instinctual feeling that that was not a good smile. "I could say the same of you, Miss Weir. You'll have to forgive my comrades for not placing you in accommodations truly fitting for someone of your status."

Elizabeth's eyes narrowed. "And what status is that?"

"A wealthy right wing agitator. And a spy."

"I don't know what you are talking about."

"Of course you do, Elizabeth. Don't play stupid, it doesn't suit you, and it will annoy my friends very much. I assure you, they will be a lot less pleasant to chat with than I will be."

Elizabeth tilted her head up in defiance and Sarah smiled as she took the end of a small blackjack and tilted her head back farther so that Elizabeth was looking straight in her eyes. "Such a pretty face. If you behave the senator might even get you back with it intact."

"If this is about my father then you have a gross misunderstanding of my relationship with him."

"Are you going to try and tell us that you are not the daughter of a member of the Senate Un-American Activities Committee? He's persecuting a lot of good party comrades in America right now, and you made quite a few enemies yourself at Cambridge. Or are you claiming that you are not working for the so-called 'Free University' overrun by Nazis? Oh, I know, you are going to deny being an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency, betraying all those people you worked so hard to gain the trust of in Spain. You have committed more crimes against the people than we can count Elizabeth, and you will have to pay for them. However, the party and the state are not unreasonable or without mercy."

Dr. Gardner left the unstated implication hanging in the air, and Elizabeth returned it with a cold stare from her sharp and defiant eyes. "I'm not helping you."

"Such a shame, but still we will see if we can change your mind."


	3. Chapter 3

After a day or so of checking in at Elizabeth's normal haunts besides the university and her apartment John Sheppard had given up and called in his friend Cameron Mitchell to help him go through her office and home for clues as to what might have happened. Mitchell had picked up more German in the last six months here than John thought he ever would, though the two of them still ended up having to make do with pigeon German mixed with English half the time. Still, the United States Air Force uniforms carried a lot more weight in West Berlin than they carried at the other end of the airlift and most people in the city seemed happy to help them. Mitchell's seemingly infinite supply of Lucky Strikes probably helped quite a bit as well.

As the two of them slipped into Elizabeth's apartment Mitchell looked around, still trying to get a sense of the woman they were looking for. Her office had been both sparse and eclectic at the same time and it seemed to him that she was a bit of a moving target in an emotional sense as well as a marital one.

After he set his hat down on a table he saw Sheppard beeline for the bedroom, and he followed, standing in the doorway watching him go through her closet. "What are you expecting to find, John? You've been going through her stuff like a bull in a china shop as if you're looking for something in particular."

Sheppard looked up but didn't answer right away.

"Shep, if you want me to help you find her you have to tell me what it is that you haven't so far."

"I'm looking for guns." He finished his search in frustrated disgust. "She used to keep machine guns in her closet behind the party dresses."

"Wow, and I was surprised when I found that stash of dirty pictures in Carolyn's underwear drawer," he commented dryly.

"Elizabeth is a woman of many talents."

"She'd have to be to have you wrapped around her finger so tightly, Sheppard. Why would she keep guns in her closet?"

John pulled down his tie just a bit, and shook his head. "When I met her she was a spy. She won't tell me what she was doing here but I'm pretty sure she was still doing that kind of work."

"Okay, your wartime love beats mine hands down."

"Sometime I need to meet your ex-wife."

"God forbid. Have you found anything that tells you what she might have been doing?"

"Nothing at all. Either she wasn't actually doing anything for the CIA right now, or she was hiding it very well."

"Or whoever took her has been here before us."

"Yeah, I was afraid of that."

John left Mitchell off by Tempelhof so he could try to arrange some leave to help John look, while John took the jeep to American sector headquarters to try to get some answers. In the time he'd been in Germany, he'd only been on the ground in Berlin in sections longer than a few minutes once or twice, and usually with Elizabeth on his arm. She had been pretty insistent that it was better for her to visit him in Munich than for him to visit her in Berlin, even with how hard it was to get in and out of the city.

He long ago stopped trying to figure out how Elizabeth pulled off the miracles she managed on what seemed like a weekly basis. The one time he'd shown up unannounced to one of her classes she had been practically irate for the first few minutes, telling him that he shouldn't ever come to Berlin without telling her first. It was that day he'd decided that she was still in the spy business, despite what protests she might have made. And that, to John, meant that there really was only one person he could go in order to find out what she had been doing in the city.

A uniform and a valid military ID, along with a little heavy-handed waving of his oak leaves, had gotten him into the headquarters. Outside was an army brigade drilling for combat that they always seemed to be expecting any minute every time John spoke to someone from the Berlin Brigade. He wasn't a military expert by far, he was a math professor by day and occasional truck driver for the U.S. Air Force, but it seemed to him that the American fighting men in Berlin were preparing themselves to die gallantly. A stubborn road block at best, a minor inconvenience at worst if the Red Army really started to roll.

It took him a while to find General Hammond's office. It almost seemed to John like he had chosen the one farthest away from any action and least noticeable… which given what he knew about the man did not terribly surprise him.

"Major John Sheppard to see General Hammond," he crisply told the WAC corporal working the desk, hoping beyond hope that no one would ask him what his business was before he got into the room with the man.

As it so happened though, Hammond's secretary knew better than to ask too many questions of people who came to see the general and she nodded for him to go ahead in.

John had gone over in his head a dozen times how he would begin this conversation, but the bald man in civilian clothes behind the desk just looked up. "Ah, Major Sheppard, I was wondering when you'd come by."

John was put off his footing. "You were, sir?"

"I make it a point of getting to know the men who occupy the attention of my best agents, and you were highly distracting in Madrid. Please, sit down. You are here about Elizabeth, I take it."

"Yes, sir, did you know she's missing?"

Hammond nodded, and looked somber. "Yes, I knew a few days ago. We don't know for certain but we suspect she was taken off the street on the way home from a department meeting at the university."

"Taken where?"

"The Russian Zone, probably out of the city entirely, but that's only an educated guess."

"So you are arranging a rescue?"

"No, we're not."

"Excuse me?"

"We're not arranging a rescue, major. Elizabeth is a smart cookie. If there is a way out she'll have to find it on her own."

John's blood began to boil. "What kind of operation are you running here that you leave people behind?"

"I'm running a covert one, Major, with deniability. I understand your position, but Elizabeth knew the rules of the game. Right now she has a plausible claim that she is not an active agent. The only information the Russians should have on her is back from the OSS. If we make a big deal about it we could be putting her at greater risk."

John stood up without responding, just fixing the general with a long stare and than heading for the door.

"Major, you can't go into the Russian Zone."

"Of course I can… Elizabeth told me people do it all the time."

"No, doctor, you can't go in. Your Manhattan Project clearance should have kept you out of the city entirely but we haven't restricted you for Elizabeth's sake. Do you understand?"

John was very tempted to tell the man to go to hell, but the sane part of him knew that not only would he probably end up in a stockade for that, but also he'd be of absolutely no use to Elizabeth. And apparently he was her only chance. "I understand, sir."

He gave an extra crisp salute, turned around, and marched straight out of the building.

And intended on doing precisely what he had just been ordered not to do.


	4. Chapter 4

Sarah Gardner leaned back into the spray of the showerhead letting the cold water flow over her face and down her back. The one thing she desperately wanted right now was to feel clean, and the one thing that she doubted she would be, no matter how long she spent in the shower, was clean. Stepping out of the shower and toweling her hair dry and brushing it out, she slipped into a robe before walking out into the middle of her small apartment in East Berlin.

She opened the cabinet by the stove and debated between the box of five-year-old instant coffee with lend-lease markings on it or the bottle of Russian vodka. Neither were particularly good versions of what they were trying to be… but even on this side of the city things were sparse, and coffee was hard to get except for exorbitant prices and if one wanted to get plastering drunk it was vodka or nothing.

After the night before she very much wanted to get drunk, but she would have to go back to the prison today so instead she pulled down the box of coffee and set the water to boiling. Tossing a handful of coffee into the pot she was rewarded with a satisfactory coffee-like smell not long after.

Elizabeth Weir had invaded Sarah's dreams the night before, standing there alone in a cell and condemning her with her striking green eyes. At Cambridge, Sarah had known a few people stupid enough to cross intellectual swords with the American, only to come away limping with a wounded ego. She had no doubt that she was in store for woman's venom at some point, but last night she had not risen to any of the bait dropped in front of her.

With her hair now only a little damp, Sarah twisted it up and finished her cup of coffee, and willed herself awake the last bit and headed to the prison. The British Communist Party had sent her to Berlin to help their Russian colleagues catalogue and crate thousands of archeological treasures found in the museums of Germany. As it had turned out the Russians did not really care so much about the cataloguing or being that careful in their plunder, so they found other uses for her.

The guards knew her on sight, and she just flashed her papers at the gate and headed towards where Weir had been kept over night. A Soviet Ministry for State Security, or MGB officer, Captain Daria Varonkova, joined her and they both went to see their American prisoner. Weir had been kept awake all night by the guards, secured by her wrists from a pipe in the ceiling so that her toes touched the ground but she could not stand flat footed.

In this vulnerable and demeaning position, though, Sarah could not help but admire the woman's grace and dignity. She suspected that the more they degraded her, the more Elizabeth would draw strength. But everyone had a limit and it was just a question of how long it would be before they reached Weir's.

"Good morning, Elizabeth. Did you sleep well?" Sarah managed a smile as she asked.

Elizabeth coughed a moment, and then spat in Sarah's face. The Englishwoman wiped it off and reflexively slapped her. "No one spits on me, you arrogant little bitch." The slap was sufficiently hard that the side of Elizabeth's face remained red, and Sarah glanced over her shoulder at the Russian officer who seemed very pleased with the display.

Gardner felt sick, knowing that the story would probably be repeated among the Russian officers. In a way, Sarah was glad when Veronkova began to speak. "Doctor Weir, you have been arrested for being a bourgeois opponents of communism. We know that you are involved with the so-called Galen network and with the Central Intelligence Agency. All we want from you is your confirmation of information we already know, and your complete confession."

"So you can put me up in front of film cameras at a show trial? No thank you. I don't work for the CIA, I'm a college professor. You can contact any number of people I knew in Spain and they will tell you that I worked with many Communists during the war who I'm sure will vouch for me."

"Really now, your father has been destroying the lives of Party Comrades. I doubt you would be so willing to say such things to his face. It doesn't matter, though. Senator Weir will have to deal with the indisputable facts once your trial shown in the West."

Elizabeth watched the Russian for a bit in silence before speaking. "You are trying to destroy my father." It seemed to dawn on Elizabeth, and strangely enough Sarah thought she saw the woman gain a little strength from that knowledge.

"Among other things, you are going to confess to a great many of your crimes, Doctor Weir, in that clear, articulate voice of yours, in as many languages as we deem fit, so all the world will see what sort of dirty tricks the West is playing in Berlin."

Elizabeth looked past the Russian officer and into Sarah's eyes, sending a shiver down the Englishwoman's back. "But everyone is playing a game in Berlin, aren't they?"

Sarah felt ashamed by her words, and Elizabeth was rewarded with a punch to the gut, this time from the Russian. It was one of many blows Sarah knew she would receive.

Elizabeth had taken some degree of pleasure in the look on Gardner's face before the blows began to land, and they didn't stop until the Russian seemed to grow tired. The Englishwoman had stayed back watching and Elizabeth had made it through the beating by fixing her eyes on Sarah's, willing her to feel how much she despised her. Anything to distract herself from counting the blows from the blackjack, though she acutely began to feel them when she was finally pulled down from the hanging position and dumped back in her cell.

In her gut Elizabeth knew that today was a luxury she could not long afford. The beatings would get worse, and it could be years before they put her on trial. The Soviets were patient and they'd probably do it at just the point that it would most hurt her father.

In a way, the idea that they were trying to use her against him carried a surreal quality to Elizabeth. She barely talked to the man in the last four years, but all she wanted right now was to curl up by his feet and listen to him tell stories of hunting with President Roosevelt in Africa as a young man. Hell, afternoons with her mother were starting to sound gloriously wonderful as she thought about what the next few years would be like.

There wouldn't be a rescue, of course. That was one of the things you signed up. Spying was such an inglorious occupation when it came down to it. You suffered and even died in secret, only for your government to deny you even existed.

As the pain and ache in her body started to dull, Elizabeth focused on the cell wall. There were names carved into the paint, followed by dates. The names were German and Polish, Russian and Jewish, with dates going back to the 1910s… but most from the last ten years. They were mute witness to men who were very likely dead, not of their innocence, but of their very existence. With grim determination she dragged herself over to the wall and carefully scratched into the paint.

Elizabeth Weir, 1949.


	5. Chapter 5

For Daniel Jackson living in Berlin had a certain surreal quality. He had spent much of the last decade and a half competing with German archeologists in digs all over the world, and now he was practically living in a German museum, working with German archeologists, trying to save a century's worth of work that had either been corrupted by the National Socialists, destroyed by the war, or simply disappeared in those bad days of the Battle of Berlin.

For all his own wacky ideas, and Daniel would admit to quite a few of them, he had no respect for scientists and historians who had forsaken what they knew to be true in order to have money and power to follow their research to the ends of the earth. SS archeologists in pith helmets running around Tibet looking for the master race embarrassed him and made him ashamed for the profession. It was probably not that far from the feelings some of his contemporaries had for him, but he tried not to think too much about that.

He was working at a large table in the basement of a West German museum, the relics of Heinrich Schliemann's Troy spread about casually. Around him was a fraction of Priam's Treasure, the majority of which was on a train to Russia, probably helped on the journey by his friend Sarah Gardner.

The sound of someone clearing their voice drew his attention from the work. "Herr Doktor Jackson, Sie haben Besuch." The graduate student nodded to two American air force officers standing in the doorway, one of whom he recognized.

"Major Sheppard," he said, rising slowly from his chair, pushing his unruly glasses back on the bridge of his nose, "I heard about Elizabeth. I'm sorry."

"Thanks, doc. I was hoping you could help me find out what happened, or at least give me a clue where to start." John walked down towards where he was settled, while the other officer picked up a broken pot and was inspecting it. "This is Cameron Mitchell, he's going to help me find her."

Mitchell waved his hand. "You know this is broken. I bet I could get you some glue."

Daniel shook his head and smiled. "No thanks." He then focused on Sheppard. "You are going to go over to the Soviet Zone and look for her? Isn't that kind of dumb?"

"I specialize in dumb."

"So Elizabeth tells me."

"Are you sure you want to rescue this woman, Shep?" Cameron asked from the peanut gallery.

"At the moment…" He turned back to Daniel and said, "Do you have any contacts over there that might have any idea what happened to her."

Daniel shook his head. "No… well, yes. Sort of."

"That's a definitive answer," Mitchell commented.

Daniel shook his head and a bit of his hair fell in his face. "I have an ex-girlfriend who is working for the Russians. An English archeologist who has some ties in unusual places. I can set up a meeting if you want. It'll have to be on the Soviet side though… Sarah's got an arrest warrant in the British Zone."

"Sounds charming, what for?"

"A dispute with the British Museum. It's complicated." Daniel focused in on their uniforms. "Do you two plan to wear clothes to this meeting?"

"That was the plan." Sheppard grinned.

Daniel waved vaguely in the air. "I meant your uniforms. They'll make you stick out over the line, and the Germans aren't allowed to wear that color blue."

Mitchell raised an eyebrow.

"Blue or gray. It was part of the de-nazification. They call the rule dye or die. I can loan you some clothes if you want."

Sheppard and Mitchell exchanged a look, and then looked back at Daniel. "Do they have chalk stains on the elbows?" Mitchell smiled.

Daniel looked down at his arms and back up with a self-conscious smile. "I guess they do."

Mitchell did not really have much hope for this little rescue expedition, but he knew his friend well enough to know that he had to exorcise the demon a bit and look for his girlfriend. He was just tagging along for the ride to make sure he did not get into too much trouble. It was after all, John Sheppard he was dealing with, and he excelled at getting into trouble.

They were at a small café in the eastern part of Berlin, sitting at a table nursing what they claimed was coffee but he was pretty sure wasn't, and waiting for this contact of Jackson's. About fifteen minutes after they got there, a tall blond with curly hair stood in the doorway scanning the crowd before spotting them and heading towards them.

"You must be Daniel's friends." She had an educated English accent and smiled at them charmingly. "I'm Sarah Gardner."

Mitchell nodded to her, catching her eyes for just a moment before Sheppard started speaking. "Dr. Jackson thought you might be able to help us. I'm looking for my fiancée, Elizabeth Weir."

"Fiancée, Shep? Doesn't she actually have to say yes before you can call her that?"

"She'll say yes eventually."

Mitchell smiled over at Gardner, and just shook his head as if to communicate how crazy in love Sheppard was. Meanwhile, Sheppard had pulled out a picture from his jacket and slide it across the table to Sarah. It was one Cameron had seen before a few times, Sheppard looking bemused, and a petite brunette hanging on his arm and looking very happy.

"I met her a few times at Cambridge, but I'm afraid I haven't seen her." She barely glanced at the picture and slid it back across the table, "Not since Cambridge at least. If you want I can ask around a little bit."

Sheppard looked like she had punched him in the gut, and Gardner shifted slightly. There had been nothing in Elizabeth's office, nothing in her apartment. It was almost as if she had disappeared off the face of the planet.

Mitchell stepped into the conversation when he saw that Sheppard didn't know what to do. "Thank you for your help, Dr. Gardner. We'd appreciate whatever you can do."

She nodded; she smiled up at them, "Of course. I'll do anything I can to help." She handed one of them a card. "That's my address. If you hear anything let me know."

Cameron bowed to her just a bit, not even entirely sure why he had the urge except she seemed like a woman that one should be gallant with. But as they were leaving Mitchell looked over at his friend. "I think we missed something in that conversation."

"I got the feeling too, I'm just not sure what."

"She was lying."


	6. Chapter 6

Two weeks. Elizabeth was sure it had been at least that long since she had been taken off the Berlin street. It seemed like much longer now, huddled in the corner of a cold damp prison in East Germany. She wondered how long it would seem by the time she was free. Or dead. Elizabeth had taken to imagining herself at one of her mother's high society parties to mentally escape the nightmare she was actually in.

The last time she had been home her mother had dragged her (kicking and screaming) up to Hyde Park to a party that was little more than a thinly veiled marriage market for one of the sons of President Roosevelt. Even after his death, the family was still powerful and of the appropriate class as far as her mother was concerned. Even if they were Democrats. It was yet another attempt by her mother to keep her from running off to marry a certain math professor and live in perpetual poverty.

Or poverty by her mother's standards.

To Elizabeth, those parties reminded her of battle. Each woman maneuvered herself into a position to metaphorically (and sometimes not so metaphorically) kill her rivals. The difference was that war had rules, laws, and conventions that were understood by most civilized countries around the world. The she-wolves of New York society were not so bothered by such niceties as mercy and compassion.

After an hour or so Elizabeth had crept out of the big house and down to the little house that Mrs. Roosevelt kept for her own, away from the domain of her mother-in-law. The two of them had spent most of the evening talking about refugees, the new United Nations Organization, and the general state of affairs in the world. At the time, Elizabeth remembered wishing that Eleanor had been her mother.

Yet now, locked in the freezing communist hell, all she wanted was to hear her mother's voice, and to bury her face in her mother's embrace.

The heavy iron door swung open and two guards came striving in.

She looked up with a slight smile, "Bitte lassen Sie die Großherzogin wissen, dass sie zunächst einen Termin mit meiner Privatsekretärin vereinbaren muss. Heute bin ich bereits viel zu beschäftigt."

One of the guards kicked her in the stomach and the two of them together hauled her to her feet by both arms. Elizabeth managed to walk before they dragged her off to what she supposed was the daily beating.

When she arrived at the interrogation room, Captain Varonkova was sitting at a metal table with a tray of food in front of her. The guards forced her down into the opposite chair, and the captain waved them out.

The Russian officer slid the tray of food towards Elizabeth. "Please eat, Dr. Weir. It took me a lot of work to convince my superiors that we were being far too hard on you."

Elizabeth knew everything out of the women's mouth was probably a lie, but food was food, and staving to death was a horrible way to die. There were no utensils on the table, so with slender shaking fingers she picked up gobs of food and shoved them into her mouth messily.

Daria simply watched her eat, dignity forgotten for survival. "Dr. Weir, I need to talk to you about certain things, and it would really be best for you if you were more cooperative than you have been."

"Best for me how? So my execution will be sooner?"

"We don't want to execute you, Elizabeth. You are an intelligent woman, but you have put us in a bad position through your betrayals of your Cambridge classmates."

"I haven't betrayed anyone."

Daria reached down under the table and picked up a folder, dropping it on the table with a resounding thud.

Elizabeth paused in her eating, a finger full of mashed potatoes nearly in her mouth. Her eyes fell to the cover of the report, a standard MI-5 cover marked secret with the title 'Soviet Agents and Recruiting Targets at Cambridge University, by E. Weir, Central Intelligence Agency.'

She glanced back up to the Russian captain, who greeted her with a raised eyebrow. "An interesting document, Dr. Weir. Very detailed. I thought you said you weren't a spy anymore."

"The British asked for a report and I was familiar with most of the people and politics involved…"

"How many lives did you destroy with that report, Doctor?" Daria pushed the folder at her across the table.

Elizabeth pushed it back. "I didn't destroy anyone's life. If they are innocent they have nothing to fear, and if they are guilty, they should have known the consequences of their actions. I did."

"And no innocent person is being hurt by being dragged before your father's Senate committee either I take it?"

Elizabeth turned pale. "I don't have anything to do with my father's politics."

"Of course you do, Dr. Weir. You have benefited from the power he and Senator McCarthy have amassed through other men's misery and from the riches that he has taken from the wretched poor in your country he claims to serve. In the Soviet Union there are no more people like you. No more rich, and no more poor."

"Yes, in Soviet Russia everyone is wretched equally."

Captain Varonkova's expression turned sour. "I'm disappointed in you, Dr. Weir. I though you were a reasonable woman. Your attitude is… unfortunate."

The Russian officer's statement hung in the air like the death sentence it probably was.

Leaving Sarah Gardner in the café had filled both John and Cameron with a deep sense of dread and frustration. They both had a sense that the Englishwoman knew a great deal more about Elizabeth's disappearance than she was letting on. Now they were at a dead end and Mitchell was watching Sheppard taking out his frustrations on a defenseless wire garbage can.

"You go at it, Shep. That was a shifty looking trash can," he remarked dryly. His attention shifted from John to a nervous-looking and disheveled man watching them both.

"I'm sorry, but I could not help but overhear your conversation. You are friends of Ilse Weir?"

John stopped his venting and stared, but since language seemed to be escaping him at the moment Mitchell answered. "Yes, do you know where she is?"

The mystery man nodded gravely. "Come, we should speak more privately."

Mitchell glanced at Sheppard, who nodded. As they walked behind the other man, John leaned towards Mitchell and whispered, "That's Radek Zelenka."

"Should I know that name?"

"He's a physicist, he'll probably win a Nobel sometime in the next decade. He writes very neat stuff."

"By very neat, you mean things I can never hope to understand."

"No, I mean things I can barely hope to understand."

"You know, Sheppard, you have a really odd knowledge base."

Dr. Zelenka brought them to a small apartment not far from the now Soviet controlled university in East Berlin. He offered them both tea, and the two American air force officers sat down quietly in his kitchen.

"How do you know Elizabeth?"

Zelenka handed the two pilots cups of tea. "Ilse was my contact with your government. She helped many of my friends and colleges escape to the west. Mostly scientists and engineers. She used to joke that she was sending us to Atlantis."

They listened to the Czech scientist describe what Elizabeth Weir had been really doing in Berlin and Mitchell started to feel a little guilty about treating this like a simple errand for his lovesick friend.

For his part John was just shaking his head. "She told me she wasn't doing this kind of thing anymore. I think I knew she was lying, but she didn't want me to worry."

"Major Sheppard, she has saved many lives."

"Do you know where she is now?"

"I know she was arrested, but you would have to ask Frau Doktor Gardner. I understand she is helping with the interrogation and would presumably know where she is."

Mitchell put his tea down, and Sheppard looked dangerous. "The lying slithering bitch. I'm going to kill her."


	7. Chapter 7

Cameron Mitchell sat quietly in Sarah Gardner's darkened apartment waiting for the English woman to come home. John Sheppard was in the small kitchen, a Colt .45 in his hand. Mitchell had debated taking the gun from Sheppard out of fear that in his desperate state of mind he might do something rash. And then he remembered that they were lurking in a strange woman's apartment.

They had been there for hours sitting in the dark when they heard the door lock begin to tumble. Cameron leaned forward and he could see the silhouette of a woman carrying a bag. John rushed out of the kitchen as soon as the door was closed. The bag was knocked from her hands and Sheppard pushed her into the wall.

Quickly Mitchell flicked on a light and the shadows became solid form. Vegetables and canned good were spilled across the floor and John had the blonde held tight with the gun's barrel shoved so hard into her neck that Mitchell could see a bruise already forming.

"Where is Elizabeth?! Where is she? I swear if you don't tell me by the time I count to ten I'll blow your little head off."

"Sheppard…" Cameron warned quietly but John seemed to be ignoring him.

"One! Two!"

Sarah was shaking and obviously terrified. Cameron thought he could see the blood drain from her face and he felt a pang of sympathy for the woman.

"Three! Four!"

"Please, I told you …"

"Lies. LIAR!" John smacked her head into the wall so hard that Mitchell winched. "Five! Six!"

"Sheppard…" Mitchell warned more forcefully.

"Seven! Eight!"

"She's in a military prison in Potsdam."

"Much better, now that wasn't so hard, Doctor," John said quietly.

"Let me go… I work for British Intelligence."

"What?"

"I work for MI-6."

"Of course you do." Sheppard rolled his eyes.

"Major, let her go."

John looked over at Mitchell stunned, but did not let her go.

"That's an order, Major," Mitchell warned forcefully.

After a moment John finally let her go. Sarah rubbed her neck, and backed away from John. "I reported her capture the night after I first saw her." She said breathlessly, and than began to pick up the fallen groceries. "He told me that they would inform the Americans."

"Well they didn't." John snapped.

"They didn't tell you, Major. Perhaps Dr. Weir's station chief thought you might do something dumb. I can't imagine why," she said dryly.

Mitchell walked up next to Sheppard, and quietly took the gun out of his friend's hand.

"If they knew where she was, why aren't they mounting a rescue mission?"

Sarah gave him a sympathetic smile. "For a smart man you are rather dense. Intelligence agents don't get rescued. If we get caught, we either disappear or we sit in prison until we are traded for another spy. That's how the great game is played."

"Sounds like a dumb game to me."

Sarah finished putting her groceries away and leaned in the doorway of the kitchen. "The Russians don't really have much on her. I suspect that they mainly want to put her on trial in front of a couple hundred newsreel cameras. Embarrass her father; perhaps influence his re-election if that's coming up. Sit tight and you will get her back in two or three years. They aren't going to execute someone this high profile over a few reports on Cambridge University students. I doubt even they consider her an active agent."

"What if she were doing something a bit more active than that?"

Sarah canted her head to the side. "How much more active?"

Elizabeth had begun to make the mental calculation about how much pain she could withstand. Captain Varonkova had abandoned all pretense of being concerned for her welfare. She had been awake for days and had trouble breathing and she suspected she had at least one broken rib. Elizabeth made no effort to hide the pain and exhaustion on her face. The Soviet officer was leaned over her, whispering threats. "You have been protecting something much bigger than what we previously suspected, and I'm not going to rest until you confess to what you have done and beg the forgiveness of the people you have harmed."

Elizabeth coughed and shifted to guard her side expecting another blow. Instead the Russian officer moved a bit of hair from her face. "You will tell me eventually. You might as well do it now stop the pain."

Elizabeth began coughing violently and bits of blood came out of her mouth, mingled with spit and drying with the rest of the blood on her matted clothes. The Russian moved closer to her and smiled.

Elizabeth focused her eyes.

John adjusted the tie for the third time as he and Mitchell and Gardner drove through the countryside towards the gray-yellow prison where Elizabeth was being held. "If you keep doing that, Shep, you'll look like the scruffiest Soviet officer I've ever seen." Mitchell teased.

"It's too tight."

"He already looks like the scruffiest officer I've seen in any army, Colonel. It looks rather dashing." Sarah said from the drivers seat.

It had taken a bit of convincing to get the British double agent to help them break Elizabeth out of prison, but once they had convinced her she had devoted a surprising amount of energy and excitement to the prospect. Mitchell had even professed his love for her when she came up with two Red Army officers' uniforms for them to wear. They couldn't exactly storm the prison, just the three of them; instead they planned simply to walk in.

Gardner showed her papers to the soldier at the gate, and snapped at him in Russian when he moved to ask Mitchell and Sheppard for their papers. Like a phalanx of sinister henchmen they followed Sarah through the halls of the prison. John tried hard not to think about Elizabeth in this place, damp, dark, and without hope.

"This way…" Sarah gestured down a hall towards where she had last known Elizabeth to be held. Just as they reached the door they heard a gun shot, followed by five more in rapid succession. John flinched, but what he found most disturbing was that the sound did not bring guards running to investigate. It was not an uncommon event in this place.

Sarah reached the door that the gunshots had come from and took a breath before flinging it open, and then jumping back. Just past her John could see one woman in a uniform lying on the ground in a pool of blood, her face a bloody unrecognizable mess. Standing over her was another woman and it took him a moment to realize it was Elizabeth. She was in a gray prison uniform that didn't look like it had been washed in years, with blood and sweat stains all over it. Her beautiful dark hair was matted and tangled with yet more dried blood.

To him the CIA, or the OSS, or the entire business of Elizabeth as a spy had held a certain romantic quality. Like he was living a Saturday matinee serial vicariously through her, a world of high society dances and pretty dresses, with only occasional forays into weapons smuggling. After all this was the woman who had kept a submachine gun in her closet next to her dresses in Madrid.

But the woman standing in front of them wasn't the woman of his fantasies or how he imagined Elizabeth's job. No matter how many times she had herself told him that there was very little glamorous about the intelligence business. It was hard to imagine this educated and articulate woman he loved being brutalized, or doing anything brutal in return. Standing before him was incontrovertible evidence that both were very real. Elizabeth had killed someone. Had, from the looks of it, pumped more bullets into the woman's head after she had died.

All it made him want to do was take her away from this place. Away from espionage and games of states… and lock her away in a nice safe ivory tower. But even now in shock he knew in his heart that if he did that, she would stop being his Elizabeth just as surely as the brutality of this world would rob her soul.

In an instant she turned around and the gun was pointed in Sarah's face, her finger beginning to squeeze the trigger. Mitchell pulled Sarah out of the way and John charged at her, knocking the small Russian pistol in the air before the cell echoed with a resounding click. The magazine was empty.

It took her a moment for her eyes to register who was in front of her, and another to decide if he was an illusion or not. Her hand came up slowly and stroked along his face. "You came…."

"Of course I did… you saved me once, it was past time I saved you."

Behind them a throat cleared, and Elizabeth focused again on Sarah. "I'm sorry, Dr. Weir, I was keeping my cover… but right now we need to get out of here before the guards really do come looking for the good captain there." She nodded down towards the body.

"What are we going to do, just walk out?"

Sarah gave a crooked smile. "We're going to walk out. I'm afraid these gentlemen are going to drag you out right in front of the guards. Those are conscripts and they know me. They won't dare get in the way of two officers dragging a prisoner off into the night."

Elizabeth brushed a bit of her own hair out of her face as John removed a smudge of dirt and blood from her cheek. "Probably for the best… I'm not sure how far I could walk on my own."


	8. Chapter 8

Elizabeth had insisted on leaving the military hospital as soon as the doctors cleared her, despite the fact that every bone and every muscle in her body ached in ways she didn't even think were possible. John had virtually refused to leave her alone since they had crossed back over the border into the American Sector. She had practically had to shove him out of the room just so she could take a shower.

Elizabeth had been taught to carefully regulate the image she presented to the world since she was a young girl. Someone had always been watching her, be it her mother, her sisters, or the other girls at debutant balls. Her professional training as an agent had only re-enforced that social mask, and it was only with John that she let it lower just a tiny bit. Yet there were things she did not want even John to see. Alone in the shower, leaning against the cold tile wall, Elizabeth Weir finally let herself cry. Her tears were uncontrollable and mingled with the water washing the grime of the experience from her body. Part of her wondered, though, if she would ever feel clean again.

General Hammond had given them a day to recover before calling them all in for a debriefing at Allied Headquarters. John helped Elizabeth settle into a chair just as Cameron and Sarah came through the door. He looked them over with a mischievous grin, suspecting that the two spent a great deal of time together. Elizabeth for her part managed a small smile at the English woman.

"Thank you, Dr. Gardner, for all of your help. I'm sorry you had to break your cover for me."

"Don't be. When the truth is told, I make a very bad double agent."

"You fooled me."

General Hammond nodded, "My friends at MI-6 speak very highly of you, Dr. Gardner. They tell me they have plans to send you to Near Asia."

Sarah laughed, a warm and vibrant sound that carried well like a songbird's voice. "Where I should have been working to start with."

"Carrying on the grand tradition of spying archeologists? Be careful, the Arabs have never been all that fond of that profession," Elizabeth teased.

Sarah returned with a smile, "Well, I can't work in Berlin anymore, and it makes a certain amount of sense. This isn't always the case in His Majesty's Secret Service, so I take it when I can get it."

Elizabeth nodded, and John felt a pang of jealousy for the camaraderie of these two women who shared a dark world he had never and would never understand. How could they laugh about this sort of thing? How could Elizabeth be so friendly with this woman?

"I'm afraid that applies to you as well, Elizabeth." Hammond added, "You will have to leave Berlin before nightfall. I'll arrange for the things in your apartment and at your university office to be shipped to you."

"But, sir…"

"Elizabeth, at the moment you are number one on the Russians' hit list. You probably won't be allowed to even travel to this city again for a very long time."

"You can't tell her where she can and can't go," John objected.

"Yes, we can. She is a CIA officer and travel restrictions are part of the job. And part of your job too, Major. Do you know how many people I've had screaming in my phone lines about a crazy air force officer with A-bomb clearance running around East Berlin? If you hadn't saved a senator's daughter—and my best field agent—I would personally have you facing court martial and sent off to … Antarctica or wherever. Am I clear?"

"As crystal, sir," he said quietly, reluctantly accepting the rebuke.

"Good."

Just then a bald sergeant with glasses stuck his head into the office. "That phone call you were waiting on, sir."

"Thank you, Walter."

"We should leave," Elizabeth said.

"Actually, the call is for you." Hammond smiled, sliding the phone across the desk to her. "The rest of us should leave."

As the older man was shuffling all of them out the door John looked back at Elizabeth as she picked up the phone. She was trying to hold back tears. "Daddy, is that really you?"

When Elizabeth finally finished with her phone call she walked out of Allied Headquarters to find John sitting on the steps watching the people walk by. She smiled at him, thinking idly how much he looked like a little boy. "I have a few hours before my flight. Would you walk with me?"

"Of course. Where are we going?"

"Just around."

John nodded, and offered her his hand. Instead she slid her arm through his and settled her head against his shoulder.

"Are you okay?"

"Hmmm?"

"You've never been big on public displays of affection. It's not like you." John wasn't objecting. He had always liked to tease her about how proper she always was. One of his sisters had even gone as far as to call her a cold fish when he had taken her home to meet them.

"I'm not feeling very much like myself." They walked for a while in silence before Elizabeth spoke again. "I can still hear the echoes of the gunshots. I … I had training for this sort of thing, but I never thought I'd ever have to do it."

"I understand."

"Do you? Do you, really?" Elizabeth doubted it. John was trained to kill at a distance, to drop bombs on cities from three miles up. There was quite a bit of a difference between that and picking another woman's brains out of your hair.

"Elizabeth… I want you to leave the CIA."

"Don't ask me that today, John. I would say something I'd regret."

Again they walked in silence, finally stopping at an Allied guard post looking East through the Brandenburg Gate. There wasn't much cross city traffic here, and American soldiers and Soviet soldiers stared at each other across an arbitrary line that represented no-man's-land.

"They won't be able to sustain this blockade forever. Sooner or later they will realize that we will not give up on Berlin, and they will probably decide to build a wall. I wonder if Berlin will be an island… or a prison."

"Or both." But John continued to listen to her speak.

"Across that line. Across the Iron Curtain are the great capitals … the great universities of central Europe. We didn't liberate them, John. Those people don't get to simply walk away because life is hard. I feel like I have a duty to them. To those people who deserved freedom after the war, and had it stolen from them by the wheels of politics."

John looked down at her, admiringly. "You know I love you?"

She looked up at him and for the first time in ages her smile wasn't a mask.

"I know."

"Will you marry me?"

Elizabeth wanted to say yes. She wanted to be in his arms forever. She had wanted to do so the first time and every time he asked. She had said no always because on an intellectual level she understood perhaps better than he did what her life would be like in post-war America. It wasn't that she was afraid of marriage. She was afraid of being a married woman, of having to go to faculty wives' parties and being a modern 1950s woman. She knew she would grow resentful, and she was terrified that she would begin to resent John for that. But what the head knows, the heart does not.

"Ask me tomorrow, John."

John grinned. "Count on it."


End file.
